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AP Photo/Andrew Harnik Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testifies before the Senate Banking Committee. An earlier version of this article appeared at The Huffington Post . Subscribe here . T he press is fairly slavering for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. You can hardly read an item in the business pages without some commentator declaring that, at last, the unemployment rate is low enough and the growth rate high enough that the Fed can tighten money… and choke off further progress. Hosannas! But the commentators have to strain to tell us how good things are. Yes, wages are up this year and unemployment is down, but as EPI’s comprehensive report makes clear, these gains have only begun to reverse several decades of rising inequality. Why does the financial community want higher interest rates? So that banks and other creditors can make more money, of course. And to head off inflation that for the moment is mostly imaginary. And to keep down worker pressure for higher...

AP Photo/Evan Vucci President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Friday, February 24, 2017, in Oxon Hill, Maryland. This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post. Subscribe here . M uch of the pre-election alliance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is hidden in plain view . We know that Putin resented Obama’s Russia policy and feared a harder-line Hillary Clinton presidency even more. We know that Putin deliberately engaged in cyber-warfare to embarrass the Clinton campaign. We know that Trump—loudly and publicly—urged the Russians to keep leaking. We also know that Trump and his family—a single commercial entity—had extensive business relationships with Russia. We know that Trump campaign officials had repeated contacts with senior Russian officials, both during the campaign and in the interregnum between the election and Trump’s inauguration. We know that Trump has been extremely flattering in his descriptions of Putin, and is...

(Photo: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions on February 22, 2017. An earlier version of this story appeared at The Huffington Post . Subscribe here . A fter five weeks of steady pummeling, American democracy is holding—because its institutions are stronger than Donald Trump. Let’s begin with the press. As John McCain reminded us, dictators “get started by suppressing free press”—and Donald Trump is no exception. Trump and his press spokesman Sean Spicer will not be satisfied until there is a totally sycophantic press, accepting Trump’s twisted view of the truth, and adoringly reflecting it back to the great leader and his people. Kind of like the free press in Putin’s Russia. But that’s not going to happen. The press has never been more determined to hold its ground. Certainly, press solidarity behind the First Amendment is not all that it should be. In last week’s schoolyard game of banning from a White House briefing media with the...

Win McNamee via AP, Pool Former Presidential Bill Clinton and wife Hillary Clinton arrive on the West Front of the Capitol in Washington, Friday, January 20, 2017, for the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. An earlier version of this story appeared at The Huffington Post. Subscribe here . F EBRUARY 20—House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte announced today that the impeachment proceeding against President Hillary Clinton would proceed directly to a vote of the full House. “We know everything we need to know,” said Goodlatte. “This woman belongs in prison, or worse, for the high crime of treason.” House Speaker Paul Ryan added, “We knew Hillary Clinton was incompetent and we knew she was corrupt. But trading favors with Vladimir Putin to throw the election, and to enrich the Clinton business interests, is a new low, even for the Clintons.” “I don’t want to prejudge this, since the Senate still needs to vote to convict,” added Senate leader Mitch McConnell, "but her behavior makes...

(Photo: Michael Reynolds/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images) The Oval Office on February 1, 2017 T he latest news about ongoing contacts between senior Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence during the campaign makes clear what was hidden in plain view: Trump and the Russians colluded to tip the election to Trump; and in return, Trump offered a much more docile set of U.S. policies towards Putin. As The New York Times reported, based on extensive interviews with former senior U.S. intelligence officials: [T]he intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public. So we now have something entirely unprecedented in American history—a coup d’état,...